Doesn't seem like you would need a new name for it, there are two different goods that you're considering spending money on. One is charity, the other is a standard commercial exchange. Plus, if you don't really want the magazine, the commercial exchange is just a piss-poor way of achieving your real goal of supporting a small publishing business.
Charity always goes over better than crass commercialism, that's why you show affection with work or food instead of cash, geez.
if economists have a name for this phenomenon
sentimental rubitude?
I see a couple ways this fits into a standard neoclassical narrative.
1) Straight-up altruism. There's some economists studying altruism, I think it's usually modelled as a positive input into a utility function.
2) In some cases, people react more strongly to moral exhortations than prices. This seems pretty similar to the Freakonomics chapter where a day-care that started charging for late pickups saw the late pickup rate increase. Maybe the article content isn't worth 30 bucks to you, but supporting the Washington Monthly* is the morally right thing to do.
*If we have the NYT, the WaPo, and MoDo, can they be the WaMo?
I think that that reaction is called "noise" and ignored. "Correcting for noise,we find....."
The obvious solution - buy someone else a subscription. Double your altruism points!
Part of the issue is that by subscribing, they're not just getting your $30, but also an additional subscriber for their circulation numbers. That influences ad rates, so your money has a double effect when put towards a subscription.
5: We can use Unfogged to find matches. People with jobs who want to support liberal journalism can buy subscriptions to WaMo and TAP for the graduate students who need things to read while avoiding their research, but have less money.
Isn't this usually called an NPR drive?
You don't want an economist, you want a sociologist.
There is a very good book that deals with this topic. Excerpted heavily in Jonathan Letham's essay in the recent Harper's (to which I will not link because, having read Hyde, it was jarring to see it pulled that far out of context).
I will try to find a good passage.
Another words for this might be 'irrationality.'
From a rigorous standpoint, I believe this falls under the principle "people are stupid". (see Mankiw's principle 3, translated - here's the video version)
I was hoping for rigor.
I thought you wanted the right answer. My apologies for the confusion.
I was hoping for rigor.
This seems like a pattern.
Seriously, I'm about as litteral-minded as you can get, but what do you even think rigor would look like in this case?
Irrationality? People are stupid? I see nothing surprising about the idea that $30 is a good price for an altruistic donation to a great political advocacy/journalism organization, but a bad price for a bunch of issues of a magazine which you can read online anyway and which will clutter up your house.
I was just picking at the "sociology isn't rigorous" scab, I appreciate the book recs.
I read a piece once by Stephen Dubner or someone about something along these lines. When you start compensating people for donating blood, for example, the donations actually go down. People like to donate blood 'cause it feels like a nice thing to do, but once a price is put on it, you start calculating, "well, five dollars really isn't worth it for the trouble."
A conversation from the early days of graduate school:
Economist: "You know what I really hate about sociologists?"
Sociologist: "Yes."
Economist: "-- That's it!"
What's with you guys, the roommate bogart the last of the soy milk or something? That rigor thing was funny.
Anthropologists and sociologists. Gift exchange relationships. both Amazon and the Economist have sent me free coffee mugs. The go-to blogger is probably Kieran Healy of Crooked Timber. His takedown of Leon Kass in "Ye Ladies of Easy Leisure" starring Laurie, valium, and the pot roast is an absolute thing of beauty: http://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/20/ye-ladies-of-easy-leisure/
19: Someone might be one K. Healey.
I thought Kieran's answer was funny as well. Mine wasn't, but that's just my failing.
You could just ask Kevin to reinstate your admin privileges, Ogged.
I'm pretty sure that I did simply donate last year, but that's no longer an option. Am I just inventing memories again?
This comes up for me in a lot of contexts. One is straight-up charity donations disguised as "memberships", like the ACLU. I'd be happier about giving money to them without the pretense of "membership"; it's not as if there are real priveleges or functions of being a "member" besides getting junk mail. I'm pretty close to starting to send them anonymous money orders in envelopes without return addresses.
A different context is entertainment. I like some live music, and I support the artist by going to shows. I don't really want the CD, because I pretty much don't listen to recorded music, but I like the work. Similarly, there are webcomics I like to support, but I don't really wear T-shirts, and I don't have much use for the paper versions of the comics.
How about situations where one would prefer to receive money in exchange for nothing? What do economists say about that?
They call that "rock stardom".
re: 28
Ah, principle 4 - 'people aren't that stupid'.
27: But it's still amusing (to me, anyway) to be able to say you're a "card-carrying member of the ACLU." Though there are definitely organizations that have stopped getting money from me, and otherwise-worthy organizations that never got money from me, because they've buried me in junk mail, e-mail and calls.
I like how the EFF handles this: on their membership page, there's a box that you can check so that they'll leave you the hell alone until it's time to re-up.
A vast amount of U.S. personal income is spent purchasing experiences, not goods, so there is nothing unusual or mysterious about this phenomenon at all. It fits pretty straightforwardly into an economic framework.
The issues come up when monetization actually conflicts with the experience (as in the blood donation example above). In the case of charitable donations, it obviously doesn't.
6,7. I'll take your subscriptions! I let my WaMo subscrip lapse b/c I was annoyed at how late my mags arrived, but if someone else is buying...!